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\title{Funding Proposal -- PhD Travel Stipends for COSEAL Workshop 2015}
\author{}
\date{}

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\vspace{-60pt}

\section*{What}


We are requesting funds to provide four PhD students\footnote{We are willing to
fund masters and bachelors students as well if they have a clear research
contribution to present at the workshop.} up to 500\euro{} each to offset
travel and accommodation expenses to attend the two-day COnfiguration and SElection of
ALgorithms (COSEAL) workshop. Our criteria for selecting PhD students will be
based on submitted abstracts outlining their work and the level of need of the
student, with a preference for funding PhD students from different countries.
PhD students accepting the funding will be required to give a 20 to 30 minute
presentation on their research as part of the workshop.

The COSEAL workshop is a recurring workshop started in 2012 and overseen by the
COSEAL group (\url{http://coseal.net}). Our previous two workshops have had
around 15 participants each, with a variety of universities and nationalities
present each time. We expect at least as many people for our 2015 workshop, and
hope that with extra funding, we will be able to further increase the
workshop's participation and diversity.


\section*{How much}

We request \textbf{2000\euro{} in total} in order to provide \textbf{four 500\euro{} stipends} to
qualified PhD students. We will book accommodation directly for PhD students,
housing them together to the extent that this is possible. This will cost
roughly 120\euro{} per student for three nights of accommodation. We will
reimburse students' travel expenses to the extent that the 500\euro{} per
student less accomodation expenses allows, with students responsible for funding remaining expenses. We note that the workshop has no registration fee. Should
there be any surplus, we will return this to AIJ.

\section*{Why}

The COSEAL workshop brings together researchers from several parts of AI, statistics,
operations research and mathematics. Thanks to the low number and diversity of
participants, the workshop is an excellent venue for discussing on-going work
and for forming new projects. The cross-disciplinary aspect of the workshop is
also the reason we host the COSEAL workshop separate from any other
conferences/symposia. COSEAL has been quickly growing since its founding in
2012, with 29 members from 12 universities and research institutes.

Unfortunately, many PhD students lack the funding necessary to come to the
COSEAL workshop. Furthermore, in the past between a half and two-thirds of the
participants of the workshop already had a PhD. We believe travel stipends will
help integrate PhD students into the algorithm configuration and selection
community and lead to higher quality work, thanks to early feedback from a
diversity of senior researchers.

We further note that the COSEAL group has no funding of its own, as
there are no membership fees and there is no sponsoring parent organization.

\section*{Who}

The beneficiaries of the funding will be the (up to four) PhD students who
receive a travel stipend. All workshop attendees will indirectly benefit from
these stipends, as we believe more PhD students will lead to a wider variety of
presented research and, post-workshop, more project collaborations.

\section*{When}

The workshop is to be hosted over two days in September, 2015. The exact days
have not yet been set (in order to avoid conflicting with other conferences),
but will likely be either the 7th and 8th of September or the 14th and 15th. The
final dates will be announced before April, 2015. Funding would be necessary
before this date in order to effectively advertise the stipends to potential
candidates.

\section*{Where}

The workshop will be located on the campus of the University of Paderborn in
Germany.

\section*{Contact details}

Main contact: \\

\noindent
Kevin Tierney \\
Assistant Professor \\
University of Paderborn \\
Warburger Straße 100 \\
33098 Paderborn, Germany \\
Email: \url{kevin.tierney@upb.de} \\
Telephone: +49 5251 60 5244 \\
Fax: +49 5251 60 3542 \\[10pt]

The websites of previous events can be found at \url{https://code.google.com/p/coseal/wiki/Workshops}.


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